Dual Training System

Introduction

Education systems in Europe have dramatic changes within the past decades and Germany is not the exception. In higher education the most prominent reform initiative is the Bologna process. It represents the largest structural reorganization of the higher education system among it 47 members. The Bologna Process provides a new model of international governance and policy-making in the field of higher education. The process can also be seen as a means of engaging students, higher education institutions, stakeholders, and public authorities in debate over a common project (Crosier & Parveva, 2013). Germany as member of this forum has initiated a lot of measures to implement the objectives of the reforms in higher education. As a result,

This dual system is firmly established in the German education system. The main characteristic of the dual system is cooperation between mainly small and medium sized companies and publicly funded vocational schools(VET, 2014). This cooperation is regulated by law Trainees in the dual system typically spend part of each week at a vocational school and the other part at a company, or they may spend longer periods at each place before alternating. Dual training usually lasts two to three-and-a-half years. The Vocational Training Act of 1969, which was amended in 2005, introduced this close alliance between the Federal Government, the federal states which known as the Lander and companies for providing training to young people nationally recognized occupations which is then documented accordingly by means of a certificate issued by a competent body (for example a chamber of industry and commerce or a chamber of crafts and trades) (BMBF,

That is, as well as having an extensive system of dual apprenticeship training, there is also a historically evolved strong institutional divide between the fields of VET and HE. In analyzing the case of Germany, Baethge (2006) has deefined to this institutional divide as an educational schism. It can be argued that the education systems in Germany (as well as Austria and Switzerland) are made up two separate educational organizational fields, one for VET and one for HE. But nowadays, this institutional divide has increasingly called into question, for instances, the demand for skills in the workplace has changed towards more general analytical skills and away from narrowly defined job-specific skills, which challenges the main emphasis of vocational education and training practices. Moreover, the rise in the level of average skill requirements in the service economy and knowledge society, as well as the rise in young peoples’ educational aspirations, calls for greater permeability between the fields of VET and HE (Graf, 2013). Let us see the dual study program at